shop in my charge . I sold oil , onions , rice and everything else . The fastest moving items , I found , were cigarettes and bidis . I used to wonder what made poor people smoke away their hardearned money . When spared by Mustafa , I would be put in charge of his kiosk by my younger brother , Kasim Mohammed . There I sold novelties made of seashells .
At St . Joseph ’ s , I was lucky to find a teacher like the Rev . Father TN Sequeira . He taught us English and was also our hostel warden . We were about a hundred boys living in the three-storeyed hostel building . Rev . Father used to visit each boy every night with a Bible in his hand . His energy and patience was amazing . He was a very considerate person who took care of even the most minute requirements of his students . On Deepavali , on his instructions , the Brother in charge of the hostel and the mess volunteers would visit each room and distribute good gingelly oil for the ritual bath .
I stayed on the St . Joseph ’ s campus for four years and shared my room with two others . One was an orthodox Iyengar from Srirangam and the other a Syrian Christian from Kerala . The three of us had a wonderful time together . When I was made secretary of the vegetarian mess during my third year in the hostel , we invited the Rector , Rev . Father Kalathil , over for lunch one Sunday . Our menu included the choicest preparations from our diverse backgrounds . The result was rather unexpected , but Rev . Father was lavish in his praise of our efforts . We enjoyed every moment with Rev . Father Kalathil , who participated in our unsophisticated conversation with childlike enthusiasm . It was a memorable event for us all .
My teachers at St . Joseph were the true followers of Kanchi Paramacharya , who evoked people to “ enjoy the action of giving ”. The vivid memory of our mathematics teachers , Prof . Thothathri Iyengar and Prof . Suryanarayana Sastry , walking together on the campus inspires me to this day .
When I was in the final year at St . Joseph ’ s , I acquired a taste for English literature . I began to read the great classics , Tolstoy , Scott and Hardy being special favourites despite their exotic settings , and then I moved on to some works in Philosophy . It was around this time that I developed a great interest in Physics .
The lessons on subatomic physics at St . Joseph ’ s by my physics teachers , Prof . Chinna Durai and Prof . Krishnamurthy , introduced me to the concept of the half-life period and matters related to the radioactive decay of substances . Sivasubramania Iyer , my science teacher at Rameswaram , had never taught me that most subatomic particles are unstable and that they disintegrate after a certain time into other particles . All this I was learning for the first time . But when he taught me to strive with diligence because decay is inherent in all compounded things , was he not talking of the same thing ? I wonder why some people tend to see science as something which takes man away from God . As I look at it , the path of science can always wind through the heart . For me , science has always been the path to spiritual enrichment and self-realisation .
Even the rational thought-matrices of science have been home to fairy tales . I am an avid reader of books on cosmology and enjoy reading about celestial bodies . Many friends , while asking me questions related to space flights , sometimes slip into astrology . Quite honestly , I have never really understood the reason behind the great importance attached by people to the faraway planets in our solar system . As an art , I have nothing against astrology , but if it